Oz Cops: ‘Apple Could Get You Killed’

Australian police are warning people not to rely on Apple’s new mobile mapping application after several motorists ended up in a semi-arid national park where temperatures can reach 115F (46C) and there is no water supply.

Australian police are warning people not to rely on Apple’s new mobile mapping application after several motorists trying to find Mildura, Victoria, (denoted by the purple pin) ended up in a semi-arid national park (denoted by the red pin).

Police in the town of Mildura, which is the Australian state of Victoria, issued a news release on Monday saying they’ve responded to several drivers who became stranded in Murray Sunset National Park.

Apple’s Maps application, introduced in iOS 6, shows Mildura near part of the park when it is actually located about 44 miles (70 km) to the northeast, according to police. Some motorists have been stranded for a day without food or water, walking long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception, police said.

I will not upgrade to iOS 6 until this is sorted out, though I suppose if I weren’t a lazy bum, I could update my software and just us a Google Maps app.

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33 Responses to Oz Cops: ‘Apple Could Get You Killed’

Actually, here in the West it’s pretty common to hear about folks (often from out of the region) who end up stranded in some godforsaken place after relying on Google maps, GPS or whatever to navigate. I live in Montana, and I wouldn’t rely on anything other than reliable, hard copy maps (doublechecked recently with local land management agencies) to drive off the beaten track. Sometimes just for fun, I run computer searches (on mapquest, Google maps or such) for remote places with which I am personally familiar. The results the computer gives me are ludicrous. Funny in concept, but potentially tragic in real life.

A few years ago you may have read about the California Bay Area family (mom, dad and two young kids) who got stuck in snow in Oregon’s Coast Range after taking an incredibly remote (and, unbeknownst to them, seasonally closed) road recommended by some computer or phone app. Tragically, the dad ended up dying when he ventured away from the car to seek help.

Moral of these stories: much of the American West is still remote and difficult to navigate, and the urban, high tech firms that sell mapping apps simply don’t understand this type of country.

Google maps almost put us in a similar situation. Out in Maui last month I googled how to get to Hana. In reality the only passable road is on the north side of the island… Google would have had me attempt to go around the sound end. The road on the south side of the island is impassible to all but the most daring off-roaders, and even then is sometimes totally blocked by rockslides or washouts. I followed the guidebook instead.

Navigation aids are nice, but they’re written by humans who are often thousands of miles from your location. It’s good to have an old-fashioned map as a back-up, and if you’re really going out into the boonies, discuss your route with someone who’s been there, who knows what he’s doing.

There is a very large bridge connecting my parish to the parish across the Mississippi. It has been open for a couple of years, but it still not on GPS maps. Tourists and others who relied solely on GPS for navigation would make something like a 50-mile detour to get from here to the town on the other side of the river. The first time we took the bridge in our new GPS-equipped SUV, the screen indicated that we were off-roading, and then that we were boating across the Mississippi.

“The first time we took the bridge in our new GPS-equipped SUV, the screen indicated that we were off-roading, and then that we were boating across the Mississippi.”

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience on the he Inter County Connector outside of Washington DC. It looks like you’re driving outside the lines in pure wilderness. Even better, is crossing the double spanned Chesapeake Bay Bridge. When one of the lanes on the normally all west-bound span is converted to eastbound, the GPS goes into an infinite recalculation loop until you’ve completed all 5.4 miles.

Here’s one to go along with the unrecognized bridge in Rod’s neighborhood: A few years ago, after the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, a motorist, with his eyes on his electronics, attempted to turn off onto the (very prominently and massively) blocked bridge approach.
So you could say that the unrecognized bridges and the disappeared ones cancel each other out, and that electronic navigation works well on average, at least as far as bridges go. Me, I’ll stick with paper maps.
(Problem is, Minnesota now has a “distracted driving” law that says nothing about yapping on the phone while driving, and I’d bet says nothing about driving with your eyes glued to a GPS–but does say you can get a ticket for consulting a paper map while stopped at a traffic light.)

Rod I had a similar problem when the extension of the George Bush Turnpike opened here in Dallas. Google Maps refused to give me GPS directions and instead had me going very round about ways.
There is an option to “report a problem” in which I described how the turnpike was open now. Within a couple days suddenly the GPS/Google Maps showed me the correct directions.
You could probably do the same with your bridge there.

The first time we took the bridge in our new GPS-equipped SUV, the screen indicated that we were off-roading, and then that we were boating across the Mississippi.

Oh, that’s hilarious! I really like using paper maps — I just think they are fun — so I don’t really want a GPS. I have used the minimalist one on my Andriod phone once or twice when I got turned around and wasn’t sure where I was on my paper map. Worked pretty well to get me back on my planned route.

Having driven across various parts of Australia, I can say that Google hasn’t got the mapping thing down yet either. I was never led dangerously astray, but if I had been relying on Google I would have been sent down numerous unsealed roads that my rental car wasn’t permitted to go on. This isn’t at all odd, as in Australia many secondary and tertiary roads are still unsealed, but paper maps at least indicate this, whereas the Google algorithms are blissfully unaware of this fact.

Satnav and apps may cater to the lazy and unskilled among us, but I, for one, still enjoy the competitive advantage that being able to use a map conveys. Like an aptitude for mathematics, it is one of life’s underrated talents.

And there’s a similar point to be made about paper books, especially old ones which predate our current shibboleths (an important point about old books in all ages). And especially ones that were produced in the era of professional editors and book production people (now endangered species, and never much in evidence on the e-side) and professional proofreaders (even rarer).

Not that I seriously disagree with Alan Jacobs in his recent posts about the potential of e-books, at least as far as concerns periodicals, mass market fiction, and some other important fields. It’s just that e-books, like anything else electronic, benefit from a double standard as to credibility. So it will be a while before that potential is actually realized, and it will probably never be realized for some applications. I just got my first e-reader, and I’m having a ball with it. There are a lot of bad e-texts out there, though. So I’ll probably rely on e-readers mainly for fiction and (diffidently) for select reference books that wouldn’t otherwise be portable at all.

This problem is caused by a rather large bug that has somehow gone largely unreported here in Australia: every town and city and suburb in this country (yes, EVERY one barring a handful of exceptions) is not shown on Apple Maps. It’ll find them if you search, but won’t show them otherwise, unless the suburb/town is also the name of the local council.

This makes no sense at all most of the time. Most councils are arbitrary groupings of suburbs with nothing in common apart from council election days. Additionally, if a town shares the name of its council, any directions will point you to a random spot of land in the middle of the council area, rather than the town itself.

The result? Hilariously bad directions, and nameless towns – hundreds and hundreds of them in all directions.

Google Maps doesn’t make this mistake, but that almost goes without saying.

It looks like they’ve fixed Mildura directions, but I just checked and Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Maitland, Cessnock, Wangaratta and Goulburn are wrong and all for the same reason. By the way, these are all large towns on major highways.

I’ve driven the highway to Mildura; to take a wrong turn at the suggestion of an electronic navigator belies common sense in this case; the highway signage is adequate, believe me. I don’t doubt that the NSW police have had to rescue people who’ve ended up in the desert, but it is unbelievable that people put such trust in electronic devices. In this case, there is no substitute for common sense and a government approved road map!

I’m old school: I love the new technology, but I’m always going to depend on maps and common sense to back it up.

Dittos when it comes to hiking through the wilderness. GPS is cool, but it’ll never have the romance of using a map, compass or transit, and don’t get me started on the clowns who bring along their cell phones on a week-long hike. Pathetic.

The only thing I would find a GPS useful for is to locate my position on a map. I had a “GPS for Dummies” and wound up smashing it against a window because it was always trying to calculate a route and when I tried to change the scale would always go back to the default scale.

I don’t understand. Are people so helpless that once stranded, they can’t just turn around in their cars and go back the way they came?

If you’ve not been to Australia, you have no idea of what rural is. I laugh at Americans who say that where they grew up is rural because from their house all they can see is cornfields. Rural in Australia is where from your house all you can see is nothing. Cornfields implies that there are other people around.

Anyhow, petrol stations are hard to come by in rural Australia. If you are expecting to see a town where none exists, you could easily become stranded.

Also, the people who walked away from their cars to get help were completely and totally deranged. In that part of Australia, in the summer you could die from heatstroke in a matter of hours, literally cooking from the inside out. The right thing to do is to stay by your car, in the shade. Eventually someone will find you.